Bring everyone together
One of the biggest challenges to maintaining a consistent and
healthy culture during a time of constant growth is the distance that often exists between the home office and other locations in the company.
“When you have 200 or 300 offices around the country in 47
states, it’s a real problem to keep quality evenly distributed,”
Riney says.
An intranet site where company news and new procedures
and policies are posted can be an effective starting point to
helping everyone feel like he or she is part of the same company and are working toward a common goal.
“Our intranet is a major conduit of information that we use to
keep people up to date on what the firm is doing and how we
think,” Riney says. “I think that helps in distributing the culture
over a period of time. We have daily input that gives us an ability to let people know some things they might otherwise not.”
Intranet technology can be a great way to offer your employees continuing education opportunities. The advantage of
doing the courses online is that everyone has the same opportunity, regardless of their location.
“We decided to either purchase or develop our own classes
that we can host on the intranet, and our employees can take
those classes either in our branch offices or they can log on
from home,” Riney says. “We encourage them to take as many
classes as they have an interest in or feel would further their
personal career or their Scottrade employment.
“It’s over 200 classes. While there will be classes we feel people in certain job categories should study and take, for the
most part, it’s voluntary. They pick and choose what they think
would be of value to themselves at the firm.”
It’s important to track which employees are taking what
courses in order to gauge the knowledge that your people are
getting through the training courses and what they still need to
learn.
However you choose to do it, whether it’s continuing education or just regular correspondence, it is critical that you keep
employees throughout your company current with what’s
going on in the organization.
“We have a quarterly newsletter for employees where we try
to make everybody aware of new employees and new things
we are doing,” Riney says.
You should also have regular training sessions at the home office
and bring managers in from the satellite offices and have a face-to-face meeting to go over any major changes in company procedure
that have been made. They can then take back that information to
their employees and pass it on in a face-to-face manner.
“Our brokers in the branches are brought in periodically to
do the same thing,” Riney says.
One tool that Riney does not have a lot of faith in for promoting a team-based culture is a suggestion box in which
employees anonymously drop in their thoughts on the company.
“Most people here, if they have an idea, if they have something that is going to make us a better and stronger firm or
result in higher associate satisfaction or better customer service, they’ll tell somebody,” Riney says. “They’ll be happy to go
to someone and give them their ideas and feelings. It seems to
work better for us that way.”
